In some quarters, at least, atheism seems to have a bad
name. In the minds of many it conjures the combative and contrarian spirit of Dawkins
and Dennett.

The Psalmist famously avers that "the fool says in
his heart there is no God", though it seems he was really talking about
wickedness rather than disbelief. Arguably, too, the writer was casting
aspersions on believers and unbelievers alike, since he goes on to say,
"All have turned aside… there is no one who does good, not even one."
Not a glass-half-full kind of guy. And not, in the present context, grist for
our mill.

Robert Dessaix in What
Days Are For tells us that:

… atheists define ’God’
and declare that this entity doesn’t exist… Trying to be an atheist strikes me
as a real fool’s errand, as foolish as hunting the snark, an endeavour that
can end very badly indeed, we might recall, if the snark we’re hot on the
trail of is a boojum, in which case, like the baker in Lewis Carroll’s poem,
we might ’softly and suddenly vanish away, and never be met with again.’ We have
been warned.

I admire much of Dessaix’s writing, but for my own case
of atheism this is codswallop. He’s right, of course, about atheists
vanishing, never to be met with again, but that fate awaits us all, atheists or
not. I haven’t met too many dogloving believers who really think their beloved
Fido will survive death, so why should people? Sorry to break it to you so
baldly, but people are animals too. And any genuine dog-loving believer knows
dogs have ’souls’.

My beef with Dessaix’s careless prose on this subject is
that I have never ’tried to be’ an atheist, and I don’t go around ’declaring’
that God doesn’t exist. My lack of belief is not my fault at all; it wasn’t a
choice. The more I learned about religion and religions, the more God faded away
like the Cheshire Cat until I came to realise He (She/It) was gone.

I’m of the view that the only philosophically
respectable position is agnosticism. Nonetheless, I’m happy to call myself an
atheist because it just rings true for me that there’s No One There. Other than
in a very abstract philosophical sense I’m not agnostic about fairies or
goblins either – with A.C. Grayling, I’m an ’afairyist’ and an ’agoblinist’
as well as ’atheistic’.

Further, I call myself a ’materialist’. Clearly there
are ’spiritual’ realities – love, generosity, aesthetic appreciation, hatred
and so on – but I’d argue these are by-products of our axons and synapses.
That is not the same, please note, as saying they’re unimportant.

I’ve seen a number of purported evidences of the
supernatural nature of reality, but I have yet to find one compelling. For
example, I was involved in a spiritualist reading once where the dead were
lining up (apparently) to talk to those gathered. It was as clear a case of ’cold
reading’ as I could imagine, with the ’psychic’ making guesses and dropping
the mis-hits like hot potatoes, while assiduously following up on naïve/honest
self-revelations that were in any way closer to the mark. Unfortunately there
was no-one waiting to talk to me that night. Perhaps those on the other side
were pissed off with my sceptical attitude.

To be sure, there are stories of uncanny events for which
I have no explanation. If anecdotes were evidence, however, we’d be back in
the sixteenth century (or in 21st century Papua New Guinea) putting witches to
death. And there are plenty of things we have yet to learn about the
world/reality.

If we’re talking about the nature of reality, though, or
about the reality of ’God’ (whatever that word means), my bottom line is the
scientific method. It is our best means of preventing us from fooling
ourselves. Before you object that God is not graspable by science, please acknowledge
that many claims about Him/Her can in fact be subjected to science. God heals
is one such instance. Many claim that Jesus fixes bad backs and mystery
diseases. This is the view for example, of those at the ’Jesus Tent of Miracles’
which has pitched from time-to-time in Toowoomba’s Queen’s Park. However,
there is no clear evidence from reputable scientific trials, that ailments can
be rectified by prayer (though the power of the god Placebo is well recognised in
the literature). And to be blunt, all the evidence, to boot, suggests that God
hates amputees. When did you last hear of someone or some creature, other than
a salamander perhaps, growing a limb through faith in Jesus? (see http://whywontgodhealamputees.com/
for more.). Similar arguments apply to messages from the dead, water divining
and the power of crystals.

Atheism, then, even when informed by science, need not
rule out some of what we have come to know as religious or spiritual attitudes.
I love sunsets, human kindness and (some kinds of) art as much as the next man
or woman. I will continue to be open to genuine evidence, and if it requires me
to change my mind, that’s what I’ll do. In fact, I’ll do it without conscious
choice, since we don’t choose what we believe (’belief’ here in the sense of
’what rings true’ rather than allegiance to something). Who knows? I might
even be a ’theist’ again one day.